News & Updates
Mount Welcomes Seven New Oblates
Our new oblates, L-R, back row: Lisa Martin, Margaret Harris, and Alyson Weiser. L-R, front row: Mary Wheeler, Kara Reed, Sister Mary Elizabeth Schweiger (prioress),
Harriet White, and Kathy Muehl.
On May 2, 2026, the Mount was blessed with seven new oblates in the annual Rite of Oblation. As always, the stories of the oblates’ journeys show the range of ways by which God calls.
Sophia Spirituality Center has become a pathway for many oblates, and this year’s group was no exception. Margaret Harris, a resident of Lawrence, Kansas, began attending online offerings and her “heart felt like it found a home to grow and thrive.” She later completed the Souljourners spiritual director training program.
Another Souljourners graduate is Lisa Martin from Topeka, Kansas. She has had a career in public health food and nutrition and found out about the program from another Souljourner. At the Mount, she found “a community of like-minded people that I would like to be a part of in serving God and serving others.”
One of Lisa’s services has been on a cooking team that helped feed the Sophia attendees; a fellow graduate and cook is Harriet White. Harriet regularly comes to the Mount from her home in Lamoni, Iowa, for personal retreats. As an oblate, she wants “to share with others what I received in companionship, inspiration, wisdom and the guidance of Benedict’s Rule.”
Coincidentally, another new oblate, Kathy Muehl of Parkville, Missouri, has a different volunteer cooking connection. While volunteering at Bishop Sullivan Center in Kansas City, she met another volunteer, Oblate Maxine Skaggs, and saw “faith and love in the sisters and oblates … to pick up my journey over and over again.”
Volunteering also played a large role in bringing Mary Wheeler to oblation. She is a volunteer at Keeler Women’s Center and participates in an oblate group that meets there. Her experience moved her to want to “continue to learn and practice the Benedictine philosophy and to be a help and friend where I can.”
Kara Reed of rural Leavenworth, Kansas, is a biology professor at Kansas City Kansas Community College who has been attending retreats at Sophia Center for many years. She describes her faith search as long and winding but “to find a tradition rooted so deeply in peace and love was truly an answer to my lifelong prayer.”
Kara travels to oblate meetings of the Topeka deanery with Alyson Weiser of Tonganoxie, Kansas, a friend she met through Sophia Center. Alyson is more than busy with teenaged sons, work as a psychiatric nurse for youth, and part-time study at St. Paul Methodist School of Theology. But she knows that “the Benedictine way provides a strong and stable foundation on which everything else — family, work, school, relationships, church life — can rest.”
These new oblates join more than 200 other men and women who have joined their lives to those of the sisters. In addition to the groups that meet in Kansas City, St. Joseph, Topeka, and Atchison, there is now a group entirely online for oblates who live outside the area. Through the oblates, the Mount’s prayer and community continue to grow and thrive.
